PODCAST I Ruined 100 s in Freeze Dried Food Don t Make the Same Mistakes I Made Pantry Chat

Hey you guys, welcome to this week's episode of the pantry chat food for thought. This week we have a little bit of a different episode for you this week. I am here all by myself and we're going to be talking about the seven steps of freeze drying. We're going to be covering a little bit about my journey about freeze drying and some really not so great mistakes that I made along the line. So this is going to be a lot of fun. We're going to really dive in. But to start off, as always, a little bit of chit chat, a little bit of what's going on around here on the homestead. And for us right now here at Riverbend, we are really, really into the heart of harvest season. We are bringing in at least 20 gallons of green beans every single week right now, which means we are doing a lot of canning and freeze drying. We're doing a little bit of fermenting, a little bit of pickling. We're doing everything with those green beans. We're also bringing in huge amounts of summer squash right now, both zucchini and yellow crookneck. Another one of my favorite varieties is one that Baker's Creek carries. It's called Binning's Green Tent. And right now that plant is really, really starting to put on a lot of really nice sized vegetables. So those are my favorite because they have just the best flavor, I think, of pretty much any of the summer squashes out there. I really like them. They're a little inconvenient in the kitchen because they're that scallop shape, which means that they're not as easy to cut as something that has a little bit more of that classic zucchini shape to it. But we are doing so many amazing things with those. In fact, I'm sitting right here next to about 20 quart jars of shredded summer squash that has been freeze dried. And this is amazing. It's such a great way to add soups during the winter or to extend your meats if you're cooking meat for something like taco filling or something like that. It's also great, though, for baking with. So if you want like zucchini bread or anything like that, this is a great way to go because it's all been freeze dried. So it's super easy just to add to anything. I don't even bother rehydrating it. So we're just doing a lot of that across the board. Some of the cabbages are ready and I'm watching them really closely because I don't want them to burst out in the field. I think this year the way the growing went, I got them in a little too early because usually I'm trying to harvest our cabbages after the first frost, our storage cabbages after the first frost and get them down into our root cellar. But right now the root cellar is still warm. It's not really a root cellar for those of you guys who haven't followed along. It is the stairwell, the exterior stairwell to our basement. So it gets nice and cool, but not until the outside temperature is cool. Like right now it's quite warm. So so anyways, I am watching that carefully and doing a lot of freeze drying of that too. So as you can tell, we're doing a lot of freeze drying around here, but we're also doing a lot of canning. I've got blueberry pie filling sitting here behind me because we're doing a lot of blueberry and huckleberry pie filling. We've been out last night. We were out as a family foraging for huckleberries and we brought back several gallons worth. And when it gets this late in the season, you have to go way up in elevation to find them. But when you find them, their flavor is so much better. They're just, they're so good, super, super good. So we've been busy just putting up all of that along with lots of cucumbers coming in. Tomatoes are starting to trickle in for us here in far north Idaho. We're always later than everybody else is. And so we're only now really starting to get tomatoes. So that's starting to come on. And it does look like the onions are probably only a week or two out before we harvest them and start curing them. So, you know, it's just really the heart of harvest season right here in Riverbend. We're slowing down the milk cows. We've decided it's time to turn our attention away from just constantly making a lot of cheese and filling up the cheese cave for winter to just really harvesting the vegetables and fruit that are coming in. And then what's up next is, you know, the butchering season. So we've got 125 chickens to butcher this weekend. And then all the turkeys coming up in a couple of weeks. And then one more round of that. And then we'll really get into all of the rest of the butchering that we have to do for the fall. So we're really starting to tuck in, get all of our supplies in for the winter. And it's just wonderful feeling to see all those shelves really, really filling up. I always love that. That's always one of my favorite times of the year. It just feels so like getting that payoff that we've been working for. So that's always good. In addition to that, I have been working away since I'm bringing in all of this great produce anyways and doing so much freeze drying with it. I've been working away at filming the brand new Freeze Drying Your Harvest Abundant Pantry Freeze Drying Master Class that is just about to come out. So I've been working really hard on that. It's almost complete. Right now I'm working on freeze drying living foods in video. So that's things like sourdough starters and making your own probiotic powders and things like yogurt so that you can freeze dry some yogurt. So you have it on hand as your very own starter culture for future batches of yogurt. It's just amazing. Not only can you eat it and you can rehydrate it, but it just makes this great starter culture. So you have your very own, very active, bacterially active either sourdough starter, yogurt starter, probiotic. You could do this for all sorts of different living foods. But it is amazing. I find that their bacterial action lasts for really, really strongly for up to a year after freeze drying. So you can rehydrate them. And for up to a year, they are going to rehydrate. You can freeze dry them. And then for up to a year after you freeze dry them, if you've stored them properly, they're going to rehydrate and be super active, which is amazing. If you want to just, I mean, either sell some of them, anybody, you want to sell some sourdough starters or you want to keep your backup or you want to be able to give them away as gifts to friends, having them in that shelf stable form is great. I know I'm kind of notorious for killing off things like sourdough starters. So whenever I have started a new sourdough starter, the first thing that I learned to do is get myself a backup, get it freeze dried, get it on my shelves that I always have backup sourdough starters so I don't have to in a pinch, like run and get some more, buy some or have it shipped in. Same thing with yogurt starters. I love this because it just means that you don't have to, you know, run to the store to get fresh yogurt if you want to make your own batch of homemade yogurt and you don't have a previous batch on hand. So this is a really great way to go. So in this class, we're also covering all sorts of other things like meals, vegetables, desserts. We're even getting into candy. Yes, I know. I don't really freeze dried candy in my home. I bet a bunch of you guys don't, but it is really fun for gifts. It's a really fun thing. Kids absolutely love freeze dried candy. Okay. Even big kids, big kids love freeze dried candy because it changes the texture and it makes it so much fun. So anyways, I've been working away at that. If you guys want to learn more about this class, you are like, as this episode's published, you only have a few days left to get on the wait list to get our best price offer deal on the class. We always release it. The first time we release any new class, we release it to our listeners and our subscribers and all of our readers first, and we release it with a price that will never be seen again. It's kind of our big gift to you as a thank you to get you the best price offer. It is over 50% off on this grand opening, but that's only going to last for like four days. So you have to be on the wait list in order to be notified about the special price. We're also doing all sorts of fun giveaways on the wait list, exclusive videos, all sorts of things like that, but you are about to miss this opportunity because we are just about to release the actual class. So if you're interested in that, make sure you go to homesteadingfamily.com forward slash podcast dash breeze drying class. That's all one word, no spaces. Homesteadingfamily.com forward slash podcast dash breeze drying class, and that will get you all signed up. You can also go check the show notes. I'll have a link for you over there so you can just click the link. If you want, make sure you jump on over there. We're also giving away a freeze dryer harvest right, a large size harvest right freeze dryer. We are giving one away along with tons of other giveaways that we're doing. So make sure you go check that out. Okay, this week's podcast is sponsored by Azure Standard. I am so excited about getting to work with Azure Standard here on the podcast because we, Josh and I, for our homesteading journey have been using Azure Standard as a supplier of healthy foods, a great place to buy bulk foods for probably about 18 years now. I'm trying to remember back when my very first Azure order was and I can't even remember it. But it was probably about 18 years ago at this point. And they have just always been our go-to source for really great quality food, especially bulk items. Things like getting big bags of wheat, big bags of flour, sugars, honey, canned goods, all sorts of things like that. They've been our go-to source all of this time since then. And I love it that you don't have to pay for shipping through them because throughout most of the continental United States, they actually have drop points where you can become part a co-op member and get everything delivered by truck right to your co-op drop, which is super exciting. To find out more about how this works and how it might work for you, make sure you click on the link below or go to Azure Standard. But hey, you guys, right now you can get 10% off your first order of $50 or more. This is only one time use per customer for this coupon code and it expires on September 30th of 24. So make sure you use this and get that first order in. Use the coupon code HomesteadingFamily10. HomesteadingFamily and then the number one, zero. And that's all one word, all cap locks if it matters. I don't even know if that matters, but go check them out. If you haven't used them before, I think you'll be really, really pleased with that. Okay. Moving on to a question of the day. Do you guys all miss Josh being here with me? I do. It seems odd to be sitting here having a conversation with just myself and without him. But I'm glad you guys are here joining me, keeping me company. So let's see, we've got a couple of questions of the day. And today I'm answering a handful of questions about freeze drying. We've been getting a lot of them lately. Let's see. The first one comes from the Cripe Crew on the video, What You Always Wished You Knew About Harvest Right Freeze Dryers. Somebody asked, how loud is it, the freeze dryer when it's running? Is it more or less like a dishwasher? You know, that really depends on the pump that you are using, that you select. To have the quietest selection for a pump, go with the premium pump. The oilless pump is very loud. The standard pump is pretty loud too. So right now I have a microphone running and it's facing me directly, but I am literally sitting next to, like right next to a freeze dryer that is running right now. So that's how quiet it is. It is, you know, I wouldn't say that it is quiet. I would say it is about like a not super quiet dishwasher. Yeah. That's probably about like a dishwasher running, not talking about one of those super quiet, expensive ones. I've heard those and most things are just about silent. This is more like your standard family, cheaper dishwasher. The ones that I have upstairs, I know that they're not very quiet, but they're also not super loud. So for me that works really well, but I don't think I would want it in my kitchen space because of the sound, because it runs for so long. Right now we are literally running our freeze dryer like 24 seven. As soon as we can get one load out, we already have other trays waiting in the freezer to pop right into it. It saves us so much time by not having to can everything that we're really, really using it a lot right now. And it, during harvest season, it just runs all the time. Because of that, it's kind of constant, you know, a dishwasher, it's kind of like you run it and it runs for a couple hours and then it's done. Unlike that, that freeze dryer runs for between 24 and 48 hours per batch, usually about 30 hours. So it's kind of a constant noise. So because of that, I wouldn't want it right in the kitchen. Okay, next question. Any thoughts about freeze drying fermented food? Does it still preserve the beneficial bacteria? I would love to store a year's worth of fermented food without needing refrigeration. Yes, it absolutely does. I've actually tested this myself. For about up to a year, I feel like the bacteria is really strong and really stable. After that, I feel like it starts to decline. Not that it's not still there, but it's just not as active. So I have freeze dried sourdough starters and at 10 months, 11 months, 12 months, they all rehydrate and kick right back into action with just a feeding or two and work out really, really well. Beyond that, usually you need to baby a little longer and take care of it a little bit more. So yes, it absolutely benefits us by keeping that bacteria alive. But the flip side of that is it means it's also not killing off bacteria if you have bad bacteria. So you just have to remember that if you're starting with something like raw chicken, the freeze drying process is not going to kill off any bad bacteria. You'll still need to rehydrate it and then cook that chicken. And the whole time that it has been hydrated, you have to treat it just like you would raw chicken, keep it refrigerated. If it is dehydrated after it's been freeze dried and it's sitting on your shelf, it is completely shelf stable, even in that raw shape. So it's really kind of neat because you can actually freeze dry raw meat and rehydrate them and they are raw meat and you can cook with them that way. So that's different than something like dehydrating, where when you dehydrate raw meat, you turn it into a jerky and it kind of cooks it in the process. If you're doing it properly, it should definitely cook it in the process and bring that meat up to that 180 degrees, 160 to 180 degrees to pasteurize it and kill off that bacteria. That's what makes it shelf stable in the dehydrating world. But in freeze drying, you can actually freeze dry that raw meat and then rehydrate it as raw meat. You can also freeze dry cooked meat and rehydrate it as cooked meat, which is kind of cool too, but you have a lot of options. Okay, one more question before we jump into the main topic today, and that is how hot does a freeze dryer get? How does it affect the medicinal properties of your herbs when you freeze dry them? That is a great question. So the really neat thing about freeze drying is that you actually have control of how hot your freeze dryer gets. You have a custom setting right on your machine and you can go in and adjust how hot it gets. When I am freeze drying your average food, especially something that's gonna that is cooked or is going to be cooked, this doesn't matter so much. So it's usually set at about 125 degrees Fahrenheit for the hot end of the scale. So it shouldn't be going above that temperature. When I'm doing something like the fermented foods or the living foods, or I'm doing something that has heat sensitive medicinal properties, so like a lot of those water soluble compounds in medicinal herbs would fall under this. I don't want those compounds being extracted out into the air during the sublimation process of freeze drying. So that means I want to turn down that temperature on the machine, which I have full control over. So I always turn it down to 95 degrees Fahrenheit. If I'm working with fermented foods, living foods, or anything that is temperature sensitive, I like to keep it nice and low to really retain all those medicinal properties. Okay, great questions. And off to the main topic of today, we're going to be covering the seven steps of freeze drying. But first, I realized that I have not over here on the pantry chat really talked about my freeze drying story and how I got started freeze drying. As you guys probably know, I have been learning about studying and teaching traditional methods of food preservation for many, many years. I've been practicing it myself for a couple decades, and been teaching it for the last seven or eight years, and had the privilege of teaching many, many, many people, probably at this point, millions of people about different preservation techniques. So when I first started hearing about freeze drying, this is, I don't know, maybe about eight years ago that I started becoming aware that freeze drying was actually a thing in the home preservation world. It was really at its very beginnings as Harvest Right was putting out some early models of the machine. I remember my first thought on this was like, oh my goodness, this is so gimmicky. Who needs an expensive machine like this to preserve their food? Humans have been preserving their food since the very beginning of human time without an expensive machine. And we've been preserving food through canning for the last 150 years or so, and haven't needed anything expensive. Yeah, we've needed the canning jars, and the lids, and maybe a pressure canner. But to me, this just felt like absolutely a gimmick. So from day one, I was kind of dead set against it. The one caveat to that being that whenever Josh would go out backpacking, he really did want that light food. Freeze dried food is way lighter than even dehydrated food. And when you're out backpacking, every ounce counts. And so he would go, and he would go buy this freeze dried food, and it was so expensive. I remember thinking, oh my goodness, this is crazy expensive, but it was so much lighter when he was backpacking that it really made sense for him. So fast forward quite a few years, and Harvest Right actually called Josh and I and wanted us to take a freeze dryer in exchange for some honest review videos. And I double checked with them. I was like, okay, you realize this is going to be an honest review. I am not going to give you a favorable review just because you are giving me a freeze dryer. Because really what I thought in doing this, I honestly thought that this was kind of my moment to tell everybody that they didn't need a machine like this, that I was going to use it and I was going to be like, see, it's all a gimmick. It really doesn't do that much for you that dehydrating doesn't do. That was really my impression. So I really figured I was going to be giving them a fairly bad review, or at least a like, you really don't need one of these type of review. So I agreed to it. And I remember, it took us a while to get set up because there are some specifics to getting them set up, you have to make sure you have your electrical set up just right. Some machines need dedicated circuits, depending on the size of the machine. So there's a few things and it took us a while to get the thing set up. They were just sending us one, we weren't really looking for one. So we hadn't done a bunch of research. We weren't really prepared. Now I know and every time I have gotten a subsequent machine, I've like got my setup already before the machine even arrives, we can start using it right away. But at that point, it took a while. So by the time we got it set up, it was January. Well, there's not a lot of things I'm trying to preserve in the middle of January in North Idaho. So it took me a while to kind of figure out what to even try preserving. And I found that I had some onions in storage that were starting to get a little sprouty, they were going to get a little soft. And I was like, I really need to move these on to their next life before I just lose them. So I thought, okay, what am I going to lose? I chopped up the onions real fast in my food processor and my dicer. And I dumped them on the trays. The whole thing took me a few minutes. And I stuck them in the machine and I freeze dried them. I got them out and they were great. They had a great flavor. But I thought, you know, I'm still not impressed. Let's see how these things use up in the kitchen. I did like how easy it was, even from the first time, first moment, I thought, oh, that was really simple. And what I found was they were so easy to use in the kitchen that we were actually using up our onions and getting more onions into food because everybody wanted to grab for the freeze dried onions. They were already all chopped. They were so easy to toss into anything we were cooking. If I was starting a dinner with something sauteed, I would not rehydrate them or anything. I just throw them right in the pan and they would kind of rehydrate from the liquid from the other foods. And they were so easy. But I kind of had this feeling like, OK, I left out. I tested the very the one thing out there that's really handy and easy to use in the kitchen. So I really was impressed, but still 100 percent skeptical about buying a machine. I know how expensive these things are. They're not cheap and, you know, convenient onions. Let's just say that it's going to have to do a lot more for me to consider paying that kind of money than just have some convenient onions laying around. And so the next thing that happened was we really hit the egg flush in the spring. It was like mid-February and all of a sudden we were getting so many eggs that year. I had, you know, gone all in on eggs and we'd bought a hundred laying hens in the fall, which meant they were just coming into their first really prime lay right at the beginning of the spring egg rush. So that's how we usually time it, just to make sure we're really getting the best production out of our hens right at the beginning of that spring. And so I was literally bringing in 80 eggs a day into my kitchen. And I thought, OK, this is out of control. This is too many eggs. But then I decided, hey, let's try freeze drying eggs, because one of the things that you can do with freeze drying that you can't do with other methods very easily, other preservation methods, is you can freeze dry things like raw milk. You can freeze dry things like eggs. It really gives you a lot of flexibility. And so I decided, OK, let's go ahead and try this. So I cracked the eggs into a bowl. I could get about 18 eggs on a large size freeze dryer tray. And my large freeze dryer holds five trays. So that means I think that math works out to, what's that, 30? I don't know. We were somewhere around 90 eggs per batch. And I just used an immersion blender, blended them up really quickly, stuck them in the machine. And what I got back out was this amazing egg powder. And I packed those into jars. And I did some tests on them. And nobody in my house could tell the difference between a fresh egg and an egg that had been freeze dried raw and then rehydrated. You could scramble them, and nobody could taste the difference. You could put them in baking, and nobody could tell the difference. That right there was the moment that I was like, OK, I'm convinced. By the time we got around to the fruit starting to come on that year, and we started to get raspberries, and I did my first batches of freeze dried raspberries, and then tasted what those tasted like, and realized that I could freeze dry so much fruit with zero added sugar. And the kids went wild over it. Once I had to start making the decision between freeze dryer space, and do I freeze dry more eggs, or do I freeze dry raspberries, I was so completely sold on everything that I had done with freeze drying that I went around, I turned around, and I bought another freeze dryer. They did not give me this one. I had to purchase it. Since that time, I've purchased an additional freeze dryer, an extra large. I have two larges and an extra large. Let me tell you, they are all running at this time of year 24-7. I am so, so, so happy with them. They make preserving so easy. They literally save me weeks every single year on preserving. Whole weeks of active work time that I'm no longer doing on preserving, and they are preserving the nutritional qualities of the food even better. The flavor is amazing, but what I love is how versatile it is. The food is light. I could just go on and on. We did the last episode of the pantry chat, we talked about top reasons to freeze dry, so I'm not going to cover it again here today. What I do have to tell you is that of all of those literally hundreds of jars, hundreds of quart size jars of freeze dried egg powder that we freeze dried that very first winter that I had that freeze dryer, I ended up losing about at least a third of them because I was making some really basic freeze drying mistakes that I did not know that I was making at the time. Then when I went to go pull them off the shelf, they were no longer good, and they smelled awful, and we knew definitely not to eat them. That was really frustrating to go from the excitement of I have almost a year's worth of eggs stashed in my pantry right now, ready to grab whenever I want them, to realizing that a huge percentage of those had gone bad, and because that was my mistake, that was my lack of knowledge about freeze drying and how to properly freeze dry food and to store it correctly, that really caused that mistake. For me, when I make those kinds of mistakes and that frustration that I feel at losing something that was so valuable, it really spurs me on to really learn about what I'm doing. That's what I did. I really dove in. I read everything there was to read. I really got into the studies that are behind it all, because they've been commercially freeze drying for a really long time. There's actually a lot of literature out there about it. It's just not really geared towards home preservers. That's brand new. The books that are out on the market right now really don't cover a lot of the basics. That's where I started doing all my own research, started testing things, experimenting with things, and really diving in. Before long, I had some publishers approaching me about writing a book. I went ahead and went with Homestead Living Publishers. I'm really excited about that. The Freeze Drying the Harvest book comes out in September. You guys, if you have not yet gotten your order of that, your copy of that ordered, you're going to want to order it while it's still on pre-order. I will get you a link here in the show notes, because there's a lot of bonuses that come with it on pre-order. Then I went ahead and filmed this class that is about to be released, because as much as I absolutely love freeze drying, I know how painful it is to spend the money on a freeze dryer and then do the work of preserving your harvest only to have it ruin. I don't want anybody else to go through that experience of picking up their amazing food, that it's so nutrient dense, it's so beautiful, it tastes so good, and realizing that it has gone bad. So frustrating. I don't want you guys to have to experience that. Let's talk about freeze drying and the seven steps to freeze drying. In my class that's coming up here, that's about to be released, the Abundant Pantry Freeze Drying class, I go through every single one of these steps in incredible detail in video form. I show you every single step of doing this for all different types of food. I think that there are over 20 complete recipe walkthroughs where I walk you through every single step of freeze drying all sorts of different foods. Anything that needs some different settings on it or different techniques, we cover everything in there. Just like we talked about needing to change the temperature on those medicinal herbs or on that living food, all sorts of different types of food really need to be treated a certain way to end up with your best quality freeze dried food. And so I cover all that in the class. So I go into the seven steps there in really great detail. Here we're going to kind of just do an overview of them because there's no way I can get all that information into here, into a podcast. So let's talk about the seven steps of freeze drying. Step number one is your prepare step. Preparing step is where you're really getting your food into the right shape for freeze drying. And that's really flexible. Let's say you're talking about vegetables. So I've got zucchini sitting right here next to me or summer squash. For this, you could cube it, you could dice it, you could shred it, you could even mash it if you wanted a zucchini powder to add into foods. You can do all sorts of different things to your vegetables to get it into the shape that you want. The real key to this is really thinking ahead to like, what is my final use for this food? What do I want to use this food for? And then getting it into that shape. You know, four things that I'm like, I just have a ton of this. I don't really know what I'm going to use it for in the long run. I just kind of get it into the most usable shape. Oftentimes for vegetables, that is some sort of a dice, just dicing up the vegetables. I love dicing. I love anything that I can use my freeze dryer to I'm sorry, my food processor to do all of the chopping. And so dicing is something that I use a lot. Shredding is another thing. Step number two to freeze drying is pre-treating. This is really key to some foods. Quite a few foods need pre-treatment. And if you don't pre-treat them, then they're not going to be great when you rehydrate them. Pre-treating is pretty much always optional, but it really, really increases their quality and their texture when you go to rehydrate them. It also shortens the time in a lot of cases that it takes to rehydrate them. For example, you can snap and freeze dry raw green beans. When you go to rehydrate them though, they take many hours in cold water to rehydrate. Something about green beans just take forever to rehydrate if they're raw. On the other hand, if you take the few extra minutes to blanch your green beans, they will rehydrate pretty much instantly and they will have a great texture. So that is pre-treatment. Certain types of fruit need to be pre-treated to turn out great. A lot of types of vegetables need to be pre-treated to turn out great. So you really want to get that step dialed in to get your best return on having the highest quality and best textured food at the end of the freeze drying process. Step number three is to pre-freeze your food. This is again really, really important because when your machine has to work to pre-freeze your food, it's using a lot of extra electricity. It also has the potential of making a mess in your machine. Something that happens during the freeze drying process is that your vacuum pump kicks on. Usually your machine freezes your food first and then your vacuum pump kicks on. What can happen if your food is not completely frozen solid, which can be the case with liquids, then when your vacuum pump kicks on, it can essentially suck the food right out of your freeze drying tray. Then it instantly freezes it when it's in the air because that machine drops down to like negative 20, negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit. It's extremely cold. It will freeze it mid-air, but not before it's gone all over your machine and it can make an absolute mess. To avoid that and to avoid the extra electricity costs, the best thing to do is to just pre-freeze your food in your regular freezer. I really, really find that that is the best thing to do. That is your pre-freezing step. Step number four is to actually do the freeze drying. You guys, this is the easiest step of all of them because the machine does the actual work. Up until that point, you've chopped your vegetables. Maybe you've blanched them if they're a type of vegetable that needs to be blanched. Then you stick them on your trays. You stick them in the freeze dryer. Now you pretty much put them in the machine and hit start. You have a few things that you need to test on your machine. Just make sure that it's running properly. It'll take you just a few minutes. You get them in the machine and you let the machine do all the work. The sensors on the machine are going to tell you when it believes that your food is done. At that point, you're moving on to step number five, which is to test your food. This is where the skill of freeze drying really comes in. You really need to know your techniques. When you test your food, you have to be absolutely sure that your food is dry. You cannot put food with any moisture in it at all into your storage. If you do, you will have bad food when you go to take it out. You need to double check everything. Luckily, the easiest way and the best way to do it is just to use your fingers. There are all sorts of methods out there. You can get expensive infrared cameras. You can pull out a scale. You can do all these different things, but none of them are quite as good as actually testing with your fingers. The reason this works is that if there's any moisture left in your food, it will feel cold because it will hold on to that freezing temperature. You will actually be able to feel it. Properly freeze dried food should completely crumble in your fingers. You should be able to pick up the broccoli that you just freeze dried and powder it in your fingers. That's how crispy it should be. For some foods, you do need to use a scale to check to see if they're totally dry. That usually has to do with foods that you can't get into the middle of and crumble with your fingers. Things like slices of lasagna, you don't really want to break that apart just to check it if you want a beautiful lasagna. Hamburger patties, you don't really want to break that apart just to see if it's done. There's a method for using a scale instead, which allows you to see if your food's completely dry. The next step, step number six, is to store your food. You guys, this is so important, and this is where I made a lot of mistakes. The last step, testing your food, and this step, step number six, storing your food, are where I really messed up at the beginning because I really didn't understand what I was doing. You have to store your food in a completely airtight, hopefully vacuum sealed environment where they can stay completely dry. Freeze dried food, because it is so completely dry, it's over 99% dry if it's properly freeze dried, will suck moisture out of the air very, very quickly, and it will start to rehydrate it, and it will start to spoil it. You do need to keep it in a really, really dry state. The way you're going to store your food, whether you're talking about food being stored for long term storage, like for 20 year type of storage, or you're talking about medium term storage where you're really planning on using it within the next year or two, or if you're talking about snacking storage, let's say you've got some freeze dried fruit, and you're like, hey, I'm going to set this out on my counter for snacking for my family. Each one of those different types of storage have different methods for how you want to store them for the best usability, the best storability, the best organization so that you can find your food, and for keeping it in the best shape. What you do need to know though, is that food cannot go in plastic bags. They are not airtight enough. You either need to be storing in mylar, or something like a glass jar that can be vacuum sealed down. Okay, and then step number seven is to rehydrate your food, rehydrating your food. You know, a lot of freeze dried foods are phenomenal when they're just dry. Things like fruit, you don't have to rehydrate it. You can eat it like that, or you can toss it into something like a pancake batter or muffin batter and let the batter rehydrate the food for you. Even vegetables, and some meats and meals, as long as they're cooked beforehand on those meats or those meals, you can enjoy those totally dry. Something like a pizza, a slice of pizza that has been freeze dried, makes a nearly cracker like consistency, eating it dry. That is so delicious. It's absolutely amazing. So not everything has to be rehydrated. But a lot of times, especially if you have a big garden, or you've been going to the farmer's market, you have access to all this great produce, and you really want to be able to rehydrate it, because you're really using freeze drying as just a preservation method. And so in that case, you're going to want to rehydrate your food. The way to do that, there's kind of a golden rule here, which is that raw foods need to be rehydrated in cold water. Cooked foods or foods that have been blanched need to be rehydrated with very hot water, like boiling water. When you're trying to decide how much water to use, you usually start with about a third of the volume of the food. So let's say you have a mash potato powder, and you want to rehydrate that. What you're generally going to start with is a third of a cup of boiling water to rehydrate that food. You're going to put it in, you're going stir it around a little bit, give it a few minutes, and then test it and see how it is. If it is all the way rehydrated, then you're good to go. If not, add a little bit more hot water, wait for a minute or two, and then test it again. It's actually a really fast, really easy process to do. One tip here for you guys, don't think that water is the only thing that you can rehydrate things with. You could rehydrate your fruit with, let's say, fruit juice, and make it super, super flavorful. You could rehydrate meat with bone broth. You could rehydrate vegetables with bone broth, for that matter. You could rehydrate things with vegetable juice, with wine or beer. Can you imagine that? A steak that has been rehydrated with some good red wine, that could be phenomenal. You can see you've got a lot of different options available to you. You could rehydrate things with herb tea. Wouldn't that be fun? A sage-flavored tea to rehydrate your pumpkins. Oh, that could be absolutely amazing for mixing into a sausage and pumpkin pasta sauce. Oh my goodness. With sage infusion like that, so incredibly good. Those seven steps are the seven steps that you need to know about and to get right in order to properly freeze dry your food. Hey, you guys, I really hope you'll consider joining me in the brand new class that's coming out, because I cover all of this in really great detail. But again, you need to take action right now, if you're interested in that, in order to get that cost of over 50% off this one-time deal. You will never see it at this price ever, ever, ever again. Your last chance to join in on this is September 5th. So no joke, it's right around the corner. And you'll want to go to homesteadingfamily.com forward slash podcast dash freeze drying class, or follow the link that is in the description here. If by any chance you're coming here, you're listening to it, and it's after the class opening, then you can still grab the class. The class is still amazing. You just won't get that incredible deal that we release first-time classes to our audience at. But you can still grab the class, just head on over to homesteadingfamily.com and search for our classes tab at the very top or under the menu if you're on an iOS device. And you can look through all of the different classes that we offer over there. And you guys, hey, it's been great hanging out with you. Thank you. I better get back to my preserving. And we'll see you real soon, hopefully over at that freeze drying class launch. Okay, see you soon. Goodbye.